Crimson Shadow, The - R. A. Salvatore Page 0,263

Huegoths meant to go into the town, but Leary didn’t think they had the manpower to lay siege to the monastery, and didn’t think they meant to stay for long.

As it turned out, he was right. The Huegoths had not expected to suffer any considerable losses on the water, certainly hadn’t believed they would lose a longship, and soon after the incident, the raiders turned their prows back out to the open sea and sped off into the veil of fog.

The fisherfolk of Gybi could not claim victory, though. They had lost almost twenty boats, with twenty others damaged, and more than a hundred folk lost to the cold waters of the bay. In a town of three thousand, that meant that almost every family would grieve that night.

But Leary’s daring and Jeannie Beens’s grit and skill had bought them time, to plan or to flee.

“The Huegoths will be back in force,” Brother Jamesis said at the all-important meeting that night in the monastery.

“They have a base somewhere near here,” Leary reasoned, his voice shaky, for the wounded man had lost a lot of blood. “They could not have sailed all the way from Isenland, only to turn about to sail all the way back, and that before they even resupplied in the town!”

“Agreed,” said Proctor Byllewyn. “And if their base is near Colthwyn, then it is likely they will return, in greater numbers.”

“We must assume the worst,” added another of the brothers.

Proctor Byllewyn leaned back in his seat, letting the conversation continue without him while he tried to sort things through. Huegoths hadn’t been seen so close to Eriador’s shores in such numbers in many, many years. Yet now, just a few months after the signing of the truce with King Greensparrow, the barbarian threat had returned. Was it coincidence, or were those events linked? Unpleasant thoughts flitted through Byllewyn’s mind. He wondered if the Huegoths were working secretly with Greensparrow. Perhaps it was less contrived than that, though certainly as ominous: that the Isenlanders had merely come to the conclusion that with the two nations of Avonsea separated, with Eriador no longer afforded the protection of the mighty Avon navy or the promise of severe retribution from the powerful King Greensparrow and his wizard-duke allies, the plunder would be easily gotten. Proctor Byllewyn recalled an incident a few years before, when he was returning from a pilgrimage to Chalmbers. He had witnessed a Huegoth raiding ship overtaken by an Avon warship. The longship had been utterly destroyed and most of the floundering Huegoths left in the water to drown or to feed the dorsal whales. And those few Huegoths who had been plucked from the sea found their fate more grim: keel-hauling. Only one Isenlander had been left alive, and he had been set adrift in a small boat, that he might find his way back to his king and tell of the foolishness of raiding the civilized coast. That vivid memory made Byllewyn think even less of the possibility that the Huegoth king would have allied with Greensparrow.

“As far as the Huegoths know, Eriador has little in the way of warships,” Brother Jamesis was saying, a related line of thought that brought the proctor back into the conversation.

Byllewyn looked around at the faces of those gathered, and he began to see a dangerous seed germinating there. The people were wondering if the break from Avon and the protective power of Greensparrow was a good thing. Most of the men and women in the room, besides Byllewyn and Captain Leary, were young, and did not remember, or at least did not appreciate, Eriador before Greensparrow. In the face of such a disaster as the Huegoths, it was easy to judge the years under Greensparrow in a softer light. Perhaps the unfair taxes and the presence of brutish cyclopians was not such a bad thing when viewed as protection from greater evils . . .

Byllewyn, fiercely independent, knew that this was simply not true, knew that Eriador had always been self-sufficient and in no need of protection from Avon. But those determined notions did little to dispel the very real threat that had come so suddenly to Gybi’s dark shores.

“We must dispatch an emissary to Mennichen Dee in Eradoch,” he said, “to enlist the riders in our defense.”

“If they are not dancing about the Iron Cross with the good King Brind’Amour,” another man remarked sarcastically.

“If that is the case,” Byllewyn interrupted, defeating the rising murmurs of discontent before they